Electronic Health Technology Views and News

IDC Health Insights: Analytics a Top Area of Spending Growth for Healthcare

IDC Health Insights estimates that the combined annual growth rate in the analytics market during the 10 years from 2010 through 2020 will be in the 8 percent to 11 percent range; this places analytics among the top areas of spending growth for hospitals and health systems during this decade. This attractive growth rate has led to numerous new products joining an already-crowded supplier landscape.

The U.S. healthcare provider analytics market has experienced rapid growth and change since the introduction of accountable care with the patient protection and affordable care act (PPACA) of 2010. Analytics are clearly a critical tool that will allow health systems to understand and respond to the business model change and disruption of accountable care, and many types of analytics models and tools will likely be useful to providers. This IDC MarketScape report focuses on analytics platforms that allow providers to examine clinical and financial data together, and to use this data to provide actionable advice for optimizing delivery of care.

Key findings from the report include:

Clinical and financial analytics take many forms. This report examines platforms that allow providers to approach analytics in multiple ways, with agile tools that may include clinical and financial analytics, text and data mining, population health analytics, cost and cost accounting analytics, performance and quality management analytics and dashboards, as well as data exploration tools that can be applied to as-yet-undiscovered questions. This report examines the flexibility of analytics platforms as well as the strength and weaknesses of individual analytics applications available on the platform.

No analytics solution will meet all needs out-of-the-box. Successful analytics programs will develop and nurture platforms that assemble and manage data, offer tools to ensure data quality, and offer applications that allow providers to explore and assemble data on-demand into analytics models that meet business needs, whether they are long-established business needs or spur-of-the-moment questions.

The only valuable analytics are actionable analytics. Analytics are only valuable if they make the right information available, at the right time, at the point of decision making. Solid data and data management approaches are the foundation of analytics platforms, but the rigor of data integrity processes must be balanced.

According to IDC Health Insights Research Director, Judy Hanover, “Analytics are clearly a critical tool that will allow health systems to understand and respond to the business model change and disruption of accountable care, and many types of analytics models and tools will likely be useful to providers.”

However, the analytics platform market is among the most confusing to health IT buyers. IDC recommends buyers consider not only the toolset and its fit to their current business need when buying analytics solutions, but also the platform and its agility and flexibility when it comes to meeting the demand of future business model changes. Providers need to understand their need for platform and/or specific toolsets and the alignment with their available data science resources when making analytics platform purchasing decisions. Providers should clearly articulate, quantify, and document the organization’s current analytics needs and future business goals to assess the organization’s ability to take on clinical/financial analytics.

Hanover concludes, “As accountable care initiatives advance, the ability to look at clinical and financial data together on the same platform, to dive deeper into costs of operations, and leverage analytics in decision making will become vital to success.”

IDC MarketScape criteria selection, weightings and vendor scores represent well-researched IDC judgment about the market and specific vendors. IDC analysts tailor the range of standard characteristics by which vendors are measured through structured discussions, surveys, and interviews with market leaders, participants and end users. Market weightings are based on user interviews, buyer surveys and the input of a review board of IDC experts in each market. IDC analysts base individual vendor scores, and ultimately vendor positions within the IDC MarketScape, on detailed surveys and interviews with the vendors, publicly available information and end-user experiences in an effort to provide an accurate and consistent assessment of each vendor’s characteristics, behavior and capability.